MARK TWAIN-THE JESTER-4

A true son of the frontier-Mark Twain was personally and familiarly acquainted with the struggles , the rebuffs and the renewed struggles of his " fellow-damned human brothers".Everywhere he became saturated with the life & humour of the border.It was a boisterous life and an exuberant humour. The pioneers lived on the boundary between bitter fact and extravagant fancy.Their stories,created in the mirage of the desert,were coarse and vivid and hilarious tales of gigantic heroes and superhuman adventures.

Tales of legendary American Samson like Paul Bunyan,whose perspiration,as he toiled on the mountainside,flowed into the valley and formed the Great Salt Lake.Fantastic extravaganzas about a grasshopper from whose rump an enormous steak had been cut to be served to all the guests in a restaurant ; about a turnip whose roots reached so far down into the earth that when you pulled it up, an artisan well spurted into your face and flung you into the air; about a needle which a little girl accidentally thrust into her feet and which two generations later came out through the head of her granddaughter!

All this laughter notwithstanding,Twain was a pessimist.He himself knew too much about the world to regard it as anything more than a "football of the gods".The greatest gift that life has given us,he said,is death." I have never greatly envied any one but the death.After death of Jean,he said ," In her loss I am almost bankrupt,and my life is a bitterness,but I am content;for she has been enriched with the most precious of all gifts-that gift which makes all other gifts mean and poor-death.I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to life since I reached manhood".

Twain's words about life and death had the ring of sincerity about them.They had been minted out of his own experience. He had proved,to his own bitter satisfaction,the validity of the old Horatian advice to poets: "No writer can make others weep who has not himself wept."

(Next-Twain with the Clear Eye & a Caustic Pen)